Lance Armstrong Tour de France

Why Lance Armstrong Is Still a Winner

I’ve been following this story. I have heard the arguments of the purists, you know, “the winner is the one who placed first in accordance with the rules.” I understand that. I think that all bicycle races should be constantly monitored, and should be immediately followed by thorough testing of every rider. I don’t think, however, that you can go in years after the fact, and change an entire history due to a court ruling. If Lance Armstrong didn’t win his seven Tours, then Jacques Anquetil didn’t win his five. Perhaps fellow Michele Ferrari patient Miguel Indurain didn’t win his five. Perhaps Eddy Merckx and Bernard Hinault didn’t win their five, and the Tours of the past half-century mostly didn’t happen. Maybe nothing happened. Do you see how ridiculous this gets?

Unfortunately for cycling and for the world, there is such a thing as an ill-gotten gain. Was J.P. Morgan, whose steel concerns violated all manner of labor laws, not a rich man? Did Idi Amin not retire in luxury? Are the villagers of Halabja, gassed by Saddam Hussein in direct contravention of the Geneva Convention in 1988, still alive? You might find it distasteful to compare the erasure of a cycling record to a humanitarian catastrophe, but it’s the same dangerous process. This is history. This affects our ability to talk about what took place. If we try and correct for crime and deceit, we’re left with very little.

There comes a point at which the past can no longer be edited. Where even sporting officials, whose job is to preserve one little part of human activity where fairness matters, should sit back and say “this happened.” Anything else gets very tangled and political, becomes a subject for experts and not for regular people. As I write this, the Wikipedia graphic for “Tour de France winners” displays three broad blanknesses: One for World War One, one for World War Two, and one for Lance Armstrong.

This is weird and jarring and trivial. It’s not a realistic approach. When we give up our actual history in favor of a better, fairer one that has the one disadvantage of not having occurred, we depart into fantasy. In the end, my solution for this isn’t medical or philosophical, or even cycling-specific. It’s typographical. In my view, as a writer and an editor, all of this would be better solved by the addition of one little symbol — the asterisk. Lance Armstrong won seven Tours de France*. (* while on drugs, in a culture that is riddled with drugs, and against competitors who were likely on drugs.)